The present invention relates to an improved system and method for receiving and loading updated data sets to a system configured to search such data sets with the purpose of identifying data elements within the data set that meet certain user defined search criteria. The invention has particular relevance for on-line search systems geared toward providing airline flight schedule and fare data to users. The system and method of the present invention may also be readily adapted to provide an improved system and method for receiving and loading updated data sets for searchable systems geared toward other products, services or any other searchable data.
In the commercial airline industry tickets are often distributed through Global Distribution Systems (GDS), sometimes also referred to as Computer Reservations Systems (CRS). These are large computerized reservation booking and ticketing systems such as Worldspan, Sabre, Galileo, and others. Until recently airline tickets could be only be booked either with the air carrier directly, or through an independent travel or ticketing agent. The most common method being through an agent.
In the typical travel agency office arrangement one or more computer terminals are installed in the agency offices. These dedicated terminals are connected directly with one of the major GDS systems. A customer of the travel agency generally visits or calls a travel agent associated with the firm and tells the agent his or her travel requirements. The specific details provided by the customer may include the destination, the travel dates, the desired departure times, and so forth. The agent then enters the customers request into one of the computer terminals connected to the GDS. The customer's request parameters are entered via a number of complex codes which require a great deal of training for the agent to learn. Once the customer's request is submitted to the GDS, the GDS processes the request and returns a list of flights that meet the customer's requirements including the fares associated with each flight. However, due to the large amount of computer overhead required to process each customer request, the GDS does not return every possible flight that might meet the customer's requirements. Rather, the GDS provides a limited list with the flights ranked in a specific order based on various rules established by the GDS. Due to the limited scope of the data returned for each request, travel agents often are able to quote the best possible fares that might be available.
Commerce over the Internet has the potential to greatly affect the way in which airline reservations, booking and ticketing take place. Already there are many online travel agencies through which individuals can search for fares, book flights and purchase tickets from their own personal computer (PC), without ever speaking to or visiting a travel agent. However, while these “online travel agents” provide reservations booking and ticketing services in a somewhat more convenient manner, they also suffer many of the same drawbacks as the traditional travel agent/GDS arrangement. For example, with most on-line travel agencies available flights and fares are still searched by the GDS. The on-line agent merely receives the user's request in a new manner, namely, over the Internet, but the back end processing remains the same. The on-line agent processes the request, generates the appropriate codes, and submits the request to the GDS. The GDS in turn supplies a limited list of flights and fares that meet the customer's requirements. The on-line merchant receives the results from the GDS and packages the results for display by the customer's web browser. The raw data itself, the list of available flights generated by the GDS suffers from the same limitations and is subject to the same display rules governing the display list provided to the travel agent's hard wired terminal in the traditional travel agent/GDS arrangement.
Recently an improved mechanism for searching for flight schedules and fares has been developed. This improved mechanism involves removing the flight schedule and fare searching functions from the GDS and performing them separately from the actual reservation booking and ticketing process. In this system the flight schedule and fare data which the airlines provide to the GDS are also sent to an offline cache memory from which the data may be transferred to various search engines for processing customer travel requests. This system may be distributed over numerous dedicated processors such that processing individual customer requests does not tie up large amounts of expensive computing resources at the expense of other functions that must be carried out simultaneously. Thus, comprehensive searches may be performed that identify every available flight that meets the criteria established in a customer travel request. Furthermore, the results can be ranked in any order independent of the ranking rules of the GDS, and improved display interfaces may also be devised.
However, while the improved remote caching and searching of flight schedule and fare data is an improvement over a purely GDS based system, there have been problems in implementing such a system on a large scale. One of the significant problems in implementing an off-line caching system is that it must be able to receive new data sets containing revised flight schedules and fare data, and seamlessly transition from searching an old data set to searching a new data set. Furthermore, the transition from searching the old data set to searching the new data set must be synchronized with the GDS. Synchronization with the GDS is necessary so that search results from searching the remote cached data will match the flights and fares that can actually be booked through the GDS. Thus, it is critical that the remote cache process transitions from the old data set to the new data set at the same time the GDS begins accepting bookings with the new data set. New data sets are made available by the airlines on a regular basis, typically three times per day. Thus, a remote cache based searching system must be capable of receiving new data several times a day with no apparent impact on the fare searching and ticketing process. Until now an efficient system and method for implementing such data set updates have not been available.